KATZMAN CONTEMPORARYhostsA WAKE

featuring[elephants] collectiveA WAKE FOR LOST TIME

SATURDAY, APRIL 22 to SUNDAY, APRIL 23Sundown (8:10 pm) to Sundown (8:10 pm)

KATZMAN CONTEMPORARY is opening its doors for 24-hours to host a wakefor lost art and culture in the city of Toronto. In response to the recent widespread loss of art spaces and organizations in this city, we wish to take some time to celebrate and reflect upon what art and culture mean to this city.

For the duration of the entire 24-hour wake, [elephants] collectivewill be performing their piece a wake for lost time. This is a play in an art gallery. The white cube becomes the black box. This is performance art with actors. This is a painting with human sweat and tears. This is a sculpture that moves. This is a ritual that encourages a negotiation from person to person at an atomic level (the only way we can move forward).

Friends, we live in interesting times indeed. We invite you to share a part or all of your day with us. Let’s slow down time because time no longer has meaning. We welcome you to come and break bread with us, share a toast, a story, a smoke. We encourage you to stop in before/during/after your morning jog, or at some point during your stroll with loved ones. Feel free to bring a blanket and spend the night. All are welcome to come and go as they please! This is [elephants’] wake. This is KATZMAN’S wake. This is your wake …

For more information, please visit our Facebook event page. Food and beverages will be available onsite! Admission is Pay-What-You-Can.

It has been lost to aging and memories, to madness and illness, to part-time jobs, careers, divorces, and children. Time has been lost to industrial lines and efficiency training, to management and night shifts. It has been lost to numbers and instruments, to clocks and punch-cards, measuring cups, sign-ins, and shift-work. Time has become something that is calculated, not felt. It has become something quantified, not experienced. Time is no longer a thing that it known in a meaningful way. Time is lost.

A WAKE FOR LOST TIMEis a non-stop, 24-hour, immersive, interactive, and interdisciplinary performance experiment that ritually explores how time passes through bodies. It is a chance to explore and meditate on not only the loss of time, but on: how we know time (what it is emotionally, physically, abstractly, scientifically, spiritually); how our experience of it has changed throughout the ages, and; how we, as human beings, are continuously at its ever-evolving mercy.

At the conclusion of A Wake for Lost Time, four members of the initial group decided to continue collaborating under the new name of [elephants] collective. This new collective maintained the values of leaderless and emergent models of creation, as originally explored at TPM, with a focus on ongoing work and training as a means of collective communication and creation. It is the collective’s assertion that the collective itself (as a system or an organism) is the primary art object of a collective’s work. Such a long-term project can only be realised through, time, rigor, and training. With this in-mind, the collective decided to adopt an ongoing schedule of collective training and creating (even when a project is not immediately on the horizon). This emphasis on rigor and alternate forms of communication has also led to collective members seeking out external sources of training to bring new forms and methods back to the collective (collective members have trained with the SITI Company and the Workcentre of Jerzy Grotowski and Thomas Richards). Since forming, the collective has built four more iterations of A Wake for Lost Time: the first being presented in residency at hub 14 in Toronto (November 2014); and then performed at The Pearl Company in Hamilton as part of the Winter Theatre Festival; this was followed by a re-imagining of the piece for Toronto’s SummerWorks Performance Festival (August 2015). Most recently, the company performed Wake as part of DaPoPo Theatre’s Live-In festival in Halifax (November 2016). Alongside Wake, the collective has created two other works: there/GONE, a site-specific performance about objects and mortality that was premiered as a part of The Toronto Fringe Festival (July 2015); and A Kitchen Sink Drama, a performance interrogation of Realism / a feat of strength, which was first performed as part of The Rhubarb Performance Festival at Buddies in Bad Times Theatre (February 2016).